Masters Thesis Summary - Draft

This is the current draft of the summary for my Master of Architecture thesis. 3675 words.

The shape of a viable future – the necessary infrastructures for the sustainable development of human systems

As humanity heads into the twenty-first century, some unwelcome conclusions are becoming inescapable: the pattern of growth through consumption, the basis of human activity during the twentieth century, has become too successful for its own good, irreversibly depleting resources and negatively disrupting natural systems. What still escapes us is the way out of this predicament. What can we possibly do to halt and reverse this vehicle to self-destruction, without giving up the benefits and opportunities that our economy and technology allow?

In recent decades, several interrelated ideas have emerged and grown into substantial fields of study in order to address this concern from different angles: ecological economics; industrial ecology; new urbanism; and lean manufacturing. While each of these ideas has aspects that overlap the others, they largely operate at different scales and may work independently to address different parts of the problem. The aim of this thesis is to consider the common threads that may tie these ideas closer together into a comprehensive and systematic solution to the resource consumption problem, focusing on the synergies and catalytic effects each idea can have on the others.

Ecological economics seeks to modify the market system to factor in environmental (and possibly social) costs that, under the current system, are externalities. Externalities are those costs and benefits that a company may impose or provide, but which do not appear on the company’s balance sheets. An example may be the illegal logger, perhaps in Indonesia or South America, who cuts down virgin rainforest and sells the timber on the black market. For this logger, costs such as petrol for the chainsaw and income from selling the timber appear in his profit calculations. The costs of losing the services that the rainforest once provided, e.g. ecosystem support, habitat for wildlife, erosion control, climate regulation, carbon sink, etc., do not appear on any balance sheet anywhere, and yet they clearly represent a loss of natural capital to humanity as a whole. Alternatively, a person who plants a small forest is investing in natural capital, but he equally is not compensated financially for the services that his forest provides to humanity. Such externalities mean that the market leaves out certain very important items from its value system, leading economic activity in sometimes perverse and self-destructive directions. As far as such externalities can be internalised into the market system, preferably transferred to those parties that can most effectively deal with them, the market will begin to encourage constructive, instead of destructive, behaviour. Examples of ecological economic initiatives include the German packaging take-back law, which places the responsibility and costs of disposing of packaging back on the manufacturer, and the proposed carbon emissions trading schemes, which seeks to internalise the costs of carbon emissions into the finances of companies and countries. The former makes it more profitable to use as little packaging as necessary, while the latter aims to make it more profitable to limit carbon emission as much as possible, and both are incentives for more ecologically benign behaviour.

Industrial ecology combines the study of industrial metabolism with an ecosystem metaphor. Industrial metabolism studies the inputs and outputs of materials and energy in industrial processes as they strive to transform raw materials into useful products and services. Conventionally, industrial metabolism is conceived of as a linear flow, from extraction, to refining, to fabrication, to assembly, to consumption, to disposal. Natural ecosystems, on the other hand, are cyclic, from photosynthetic producers drawing nutrients from the ground and storing energy from the sun, to consumers who eat some of them, to decomposers who turn dead plants and animals and organic ‘wastes’ back into nutrients. In the natural ecosystem, both the input of previously bio-unavailable material into the system and the output of sequestered material out of the system are very small compared to the volume of nutrients cycling within the system. The goal of industrial ecology is to look for opportunities for industry to recycle and reuse residues and by-products as much as possible, and minimise the amount of material extracted from virgin sources and the amount of material dissipated or otherwise irrecoverably disposed of. To the extent that this is successful, the rate of resource depletion and environmental degradation due to industrial activity will be reduced, hopefully to levels that can be accommodated by natural systems. An example of a well-developed and formalised industrial ecosystem is in Kalundborg, Denmark, where a power station, a plasterboard company, a pharmaceutical plant, an enzyme producer, an oil refinery, and a waste company cooperate to utilise each other’s production by-products as input materials in complementary processes. Such symbiosis is both financially more profitable and environmentally more benign than if the companies operated separately.

New urbanism is concerned with the design of cities and, primarily, critical of suburban sprawl. In order for a city to function as a place of residence, commerce, community, and civilisation, city neighbourhoods need to be sufficiently dense and diverse with frequent interconnected streets and lanes and varied mixes of uses. In focusing on higher-density walk-able neighbourhoods that foster community and public vitality, new urbanism reduces the need for private automobiles and their associated pollution and fossil fuel consumption. Higher densities also mean closer distances between people and services, reducing the amount of roads and other necessary infrastructure, reducing the land area that is paved and built upon, thereby reducing the associated habitat destruction and environmental burden. Successful communities also become forces for decentralisation and democratisation; as higher density allow neighbourhood grocers, cafes, and other small shops to become economically viable, centralised supermarkets and shopping malls accessed by automobile, not exactly desirable to begin with, are no longer as necessary. Successful communities develop within themselves the social networks that enable economic cooperatives and political action. An oft cited example of a successful urban development that nurtures rather than destroys community is the city of Curitiba, Brazil, under the leadership of mayor Jaime Lerner, where zoning for density around an effective transportation network, the conversion of hydrologically sensitive areas to parks, and pragmatic social development initiatives were combined to make Curitiba one of the best examples of urban planning worldwide.

Lean manufacturing, ostensibly, is about the arrangement and the management of factory floor in a way that enables greater flexibility and whole-system productivity, while continuously seeking to eliminate waste of all kinds. The essence of lean manufacturing is the arrangement of labour into small, multi-skilled, semi-autonomous work teams which, when given the necessary tools and equipment, become semi-autonomous work cells. Each work cell is capable of and responsible for managing its own day-to-day activities, managing internal workload and workflow, routine maintenance of its equipment, and the monitoring and improvement of its performance. In this way, people with the most intimate knowledge of the situation at the shop floor do most of the routine decision-making. Each cell manages its own ‘suppliers’ and ‘customers’, whether these are other cells within the same company or entities from outside. Work is done on demand, in the form of a ‘pull’ signal from a customer, so that only work that is actually needed is done. Management is no longer given the task of making too many decisions with too little information. While the origin of lean manufacturing is the Toyota Production System, the possibilities for the application of lean principles extend far from the automobile factory. Compared with the semi-autonomous work team of the lean factory, the typical person simultaneously has too much and too little freedom. Too much freedom in that his activities need not respond to any real demand signal; too little freedom in that he does not have the authority or ability to optimise much of his ‘equipment’ (the streets, public utilities, the urban fabric, etc.). The decentralisation of civic authority to neighbourhoods and communities at all levels that have successfully acquired the skills and the tools to manage themselves may prove to be the key to more agile, more responsive, and less wasteful city management.

While each of the four themes can and do, to some extent, work independently towards addressing the problems of resource depletion and environmental degradation, they each have certain shortcomings that may prevent their full implementation. For example, ecological economics seeks to modify laws and market rules to internalise current externalities into companies’ finances, but where these represent significant short-term costs to the companies, they will be vigorously resisted. Industrial ecology seeks to make all of humanity’s material flows cyclic and non-dissipative, but where production and consumption are not on a large enough scales or sufficiently organised to make waste management economically viable, this cannot happen. New urbanism argues for compact city developments that make efficient use of infrastructure, but as long as cities are willing to subsidise roads and infrastructure for sprawling developments and as long as substantial automobile costs remain externalities, the automobile suburb will remain attractive. Lean manufacturing principles suggests the pervasive decentralisation of decision making authority to relatively small and localised groups of skilled and equipped individuals in order to increase the agility and efficiency of decision making, but these groups can only form within neighbourhoods with successful communities and they will not have anything to work on if current patterns of consumption remain the norm.

But here is where the mutually supporting nature of these four themes becomes apparent. Ecological economics would become much easier to implement if industrial ecology initiatives and new urban design have already made firms and cities more ecologically benign, and therefore have fewer costs imposed on them when integrating ecological accounting (perhaps they may even make a net profit from it, as both external costs and benefits are internalised). Industrial ecology can become economically viable for even the smallest of firms and households if they exist within a successful community where it is easy to pool resources and skills and to find niche opportunities. New urbanist city developments would become much more economically viable if ecological economics made it more evidently expensive to sprawl, and if people demanded functioning communities where they can profit through cooperation. Lean manufacturing style decentralisation and self-management can occur where new urbanist neighbourhood enables community action, and where ecological economics and industrial ecology initiatives require the organisation of cooperative action. This is the central proposition of this thesis: we already have the foundations of the solution to the great problem of our generation, resource depletion and environmental degradation, and we need only to implement all the partial solutions we have devised together as integrated system of mutually supporting elements.

It is difficult to foresee what the outcomes of this enterprise would be owing to the synergetic effects we hope, indeed we need, to create. Ideally, all present market externalities will become internalised: it will be very expensive to harvest natural resources, but even more profitable to regenerate natural capital; agriculture will be profitable if the soil has more nutrients in it at the end of the season than at the beginning; urban forms that displace local flora and fauna will be very expensive, but those that support and coexist with them will profit from it. The concept of ‘waste’ will become an anachronism: all individuals will automatically separate their residue streams to facilitate recycling or they will employ someone else to do it at a price; all residues will then be traded on a marketplace of residues, passing from those who want to be rid of it to those who can make use of it; products that are designed for recycling or, better yet, services provided without the transfer of products, will displace ‘consume and dispose’ as the self-evident economic logic. There will not be any part of any city that is dominated by a single use: residence, business, commerce, and clean industry will be located in close proximity to each other; circulation of people and materials will be local wherever possible, while knowledge and information will travel speedily around the globe; people will have the opportunity to come into contact with others in their neighbourhood without the mediation of the automobile, and the resulting community will profit from the social, economic, and political opportunities that this provides. Decentralised cooperative organisations will be given responsibility, authority and accountability for most of the services currently provided by centralised civic governments: neighbourhoods will plan their own land use and development rules, seamlessly taking into account the social and environmental concerns that have become internalised into their finances; neighbourhoods will organise the procurement of services and equipment that would be more economic to provide in as shared resources to the entire neighbourhood; neighbourhoods will internally process any refuse, wastewater, and sewage to the extent that it is economical to do so, and collectively arrange for the sale of any material that is better processed externally.

All these things will be the outcome of a human system that has successfully internalised the responsible custodianship of natural systems into its very core assumptions. This is the solution to the current socio-economic system that implicitly assumes the unlimited expansion of human consumption and counts the liquidation of natural assets as profit. While the distance that needs to be travelled seems great, the journey has already begun. The first steps have been taking by different people from different directions. By each enabling the opportunities of the others, they will arrive at their destination.